Perceiving unstressed vowels in foreign-accented English

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Phonetics
• Second Language Acquisition

Background:

• English unstressed vowels typically reduce to /ə/, a feature less pronounced in Dutch speakers of English.
• Both English and Dutch speakers use suprasegmental cues like duration and intensity to mark stress.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how foreign-accented stress cues influence on-line speech comprehension in native British English listeners.
• To determine the relative importance of vowel quality versus suprasegmental information in processing lexical stress in accented speech.

Main Methods:

• A cross-modal priming experiment was conducted with British English listeners.
• Participants performed lexical decisions on visual targets following auditory primes (stress-matching, mismatching, or unrelated).
• Prime fragments were produced by either native English speakers or Dutch speakers of English.

Main Results:

• A significant priming effect for stress-matching primes was observed only when produced by the native English speaker.
• This suggests vowel quality is a more critical cue for lexical stress perception than suprasegmental features in this context.
• Priming occurred for both speakers on targets with initial secondary stress (e.g., CAMPAIGN), where vowel reduction is absent, aligning with Dutch stress patterns.

Conclusions:

• Dutch-accented English is not inherently harder to comprehend.
• Comprehension difficulties arise specifically when the realization of lexical stress differs between the native language and the accented variety.
• Vowel quality is a primary cue for native English listeners processing lexical stress, while suprasegmental cues are less critical unless stress realization aligns across languages.